I actually had to look it up on the internet to see if Defiance 2050 was in fact an actual remake of the original Defiance, or if everything just seemed really, really familiar. The answer was the former, as Trion Worlds has given Defiance a bit of a reboot, now that enough time has passed for people to forget it was a thing last gen.
Now that the game is no longer tethered to the defunct television show, the developers have apparently added a bunch of content to Defiance 2050, but I likely won’t even know it when I see it.
I was rather excited when I learned it was releasing this week; I found the original on Xbox 360 fairly entertaining, even if the missions were super shallow and basically just boiled down to “go there, shoot that.” Unfortunately, it looks like Trion Worlds hasn’t learned much since the last outing. While the game is obviously in HD and has a fairly smooth frame rate, the net code is still complete shit and when I was actually able to stay connected, the lag made it unplayable.
It was actually an interesting thing to see. In this age of fiber connections, gigabit bandwidth, and game streaming, I honestly had thought that lag of this magnitude on a dedicated server was a thing of the past. One can expect a little bit of rubber-banding in a racing game or a bit of choppiness here or there, but with multiplayer games like Battlefield and Call of Duty offering smooth online play and MMO’s like Elder Scrolls Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and others having been pretty solid for a while now, watching a group of mutants running in place for 45 seconds after I shot them was pretty disheartening. They then either exploded, teleported to another location, or disappeared completely. Twice, my game resumed with my character dead on the ground, having been on the ass end of a whuppin’ I didn’t know I was taking.
Needless to say, if Trion Worlds can’t get their shit together, this game is going to be dead on arrival. It’s never really been that engrossing of an MMO to begin with, but it was a fun shoot ’em up. If you take that away due to poor net code, then there’s literally no reason to play it. Not when there are many other, more functional things to play.
